Normal Schools

Normal schools were American educational institutions that were, initially, focused on training teachers to work in the nation's common schools. The first U.S. normal school was founded in 1839 in Lexington, Massachusetts. The institutions quickly spread to neighboring states, then to the entire nation. The normal school movement was a necessary feature of 19th-century American life because of two phenomena. First, the proliferation of free public education—first across the North and then the South in the aftermath of the Civil War—meant that large numbers of teachers were needed to staff the schools of the emerging public school movement. Second, because American colleges and universities did not begin to accept teacher education as a legitimate academic function until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a market demand for teacher training institutions. Not all teachers were, or were even required to be, trained at a normal school. Many teachers were simply hired without any formal training. In many midwestern states, for example, less than half of the teaching force had attended a normal school of any kind.

In addition to the teacher training function, many normal schools established “practice schools” to function in tandem with the normal school. Practice schools were regular tuition-based schools for school-age children. The normal school students often “practiced” teaching in these schools under the supervision of normal school faculty. Normal schools existed as publicly subsidized “state” institutions and as private and proprietary schools.

Aspiring teachers studying in the normal school were usually confronted with a 19th-century epis-temology known as the “branches of knowledge.” The normal school curriculum was divided between the common branches (e.g., reading, writing, basic arithmetic) and the higher branches (e.g., anthropology, chemistry, history). Through a process of lecture, drill, and recitation, normal school students were expected to demonstrate they had memorized relevant facts and could answer likely questions about the topic at hand.

After the American Civil War, many private and proprietary normal schools expanded their academic offerings to include an array of subjects, including pharmacy, medicine, law, telegraphy, and dentistry, among other subjects. Because of the lack of agreement over what constituted appropriate training in many professions, normal schools were able to offer degree or certificate programs to aspiring professionals in these fields. At their height, normal schools rivaled or surpassed regular colleges and universities in terms of student enrollment. For example, National Normal University in Lebanon, Ohio, enrolled over 2,000 students annually between 1885 and 1893, making it the largest school of any kind in Ohio and one of the largest in the country. Another normal school of national fame was New York's Oswego Normal School. Rising to prominence in the 1860s and presided over by Edward Sheldon, the Oswego Normal School was an early pioneer of Pestalozzian (i.e., object-based) teaching methods.

Normal schools went into decline in the early 20th century as a result of several factors, including increasing teacher education requirements, the increasing availability of public high schools (which limited the need for the “practice schools” associated with the normal schools), and the embrace of teacher education as an academic discipline by colleges and universities. Moreover, the training requirements for other professions were also becoming more standardized (e.g., organizations of physicians, pharmacists, and other professions were effectively raising the training requirements for practitioners in their respective fields).

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